AMFAT Challenge Week 12

Continuing the story from week 10...

So I just recovered from being sick, The Open was finished and this weekend was the first local Mountain bike race, and better yet the weather was going to be nice.  The weather actually turned out to be the best day we've had so far this month!

Since I need time in on the bike, I decided I would race the Marathon category, which is a 4 to 4.5 hour race, in total I ended up riding 5 hours, with a practice/warm-up lap.  Overall my performance was good, I rode harder than I thought I would be able to for 3 hours and then for the last 1.5 my legs cramped up and I went into survival mode just to keep moving, not a great finish, but I was glad to find out what my legs could do and where I was at for the year.  I was actually really happy with how I performed.
Sadly I revereted back to sugar gel packs and drinks for this race, I do have Paleo recipes to replace these, but I just wasn't organized enough to get everything ready this week.  I will be posting in the future as I switch to all Paleo nutrition on-the-bike!

I expected to be hungry after the race, but my hunger was uncontrollable!  I'm talking ridiculously uncontrollable.  I would eat until I was full, then an hour later I would eat until I was full again and so on, I did this for several days and it was frustrating because I knew I was overeating, but why, and how come I couldn't stop? 

Despite gaining weight by the day, the good part is that this pattern is identical to what happened after the indoor tri, (although much more severe) Wow! I'm an engineer and it's a good thing being able to identify a repeatable pattern, especially when you have somewhere you can go to help identify and fix it:  I immediately went to the PIB VIP group on Facebook and posted this problem.

I got some good responses, and even more awesome I got a direct response from Justin via video blog, he had been getting a lot of endurance questions recently, and with my question, he decided it was time to post a capture-all response.

To put it simply, I wasn't eating enough carbs, seems way too simple, but there was no way I would have been able to identify this myself.  It was now about 4 days after the race and I was still suffering the constant eating, although perhaps a bit less frequently, so I decided I would go home and eat some carbs, better late than never.  Here's the response I posted to the group after doing so:

I don't think I need to say anymore!  Only real bummer is that I wish I could have identified this issue the week after the Indoor Triathlon.  Then I could have made a lot more progress in the second half of the challenge.  Now I'm only days away from the end of the challenge, my performance has flat lined and I've gained back a couple pounds.  Even with the anti-progress, I'm still way ahead of where I was at for the start of the challenge, but I really wanted to post some amazing results and win this thing!

That's the competitor in me speaking, stepping back and looking at the big picture, this discovery is monumental!  "revolutionary" as I quoted above, this unlocks my future potential and looking at the long term, I now have all the puzzle pieces figured out to apply the PIB system to Endurance Cycling which is my primary sport/hobby/passion!   Sure I would like to have won the AMFAT challenge (and who knows maybe I still will), but this knowledge is a far bigger prize! 

Just for the sake of arguement, lets say I hadn't figured this out and did win the challenge, that actually would have been really bad, a great short term battle won for sure, but I would have lost the war...  In that scenario I would never have even known I had lost the war.  That is what makes this discovery so great, it was something that I didn't even know I needed to figure out!

So for the rest of week (after eating lots more carbs), I was feeling better by the day, but was I still drained for my benchmark WOD's, so they are nothing to get excited about for performance gains. Well, actually I've made a lot of performance gains, but they are just not apparent in the benchmarks.   So stay tuned, I'll be posting my final essay for the Competition soon!

The essay I wrote is like a term paper, quite a few pages, graphs, pictures, and lots of pictures (yes, before and after photos)!

AMFAT Challenge Week 10 and Week 11

I'm clumping these two weeks together because this is the timeframe where things didn't go so well.  Just like in the movies, where the hero has to be down on his luck and have reached the bottom before he can rise up to the challenge and succeed.   Well, this was that dark time period for me...

As the Crossfit Open continued on, I never felt I performed as good as 13.1, in fact everything was off, I was tired, and in the back of mind mind I knew something was wrong...  I ended up trying to catch up on a few other things in week 10 and in doing so I stayed up later than usual, and because I was tired I skipped a few workouts, not to mention that the weather outside has not been cooperating at all... 

Week 11 is when things really got bad, after running myself down for the past week I ended up sick over the weekend...  SICK ??!!!  WTF?  I'm Indestructable!  How can this happen?  I wasn't super sick, but my nose ran constantly and my energy levels were depleted.   I din't miss any work and after 2 days I started feeling better everyday, but it was Wednesday before I got back to the Box for a WOD, not to mention I hadn't swam, biked, or ran since Saturday... 

Being sick for awhile, I had a lot of time to think about what might be going on and really I just couldn't place it what was happening?  I had pretty much decided I was overtrained and then next week the tide changed and major breakthrough's were discovered!!!   So hurry up and get to my next blog to continue the next dramatic installment of My Paleo Lifestyle.

AMFAT Challenge Week 9:

This week, I'm actually going to write about some events that happened over the weekend and last week, mostly because lots of interesting stuff happened last week and not a whole lot this week.

Over the weekend I traveled to Colorado to hang out with friends, we pretty much tend to eat out all the time while when I visit.  I wasn't about to go off the deep end and order anything non-paleo and actually it turned out to be quite easy to stay within Paleo requirements.  Hamburger's I ordered without buns and side salads (none of the food I'll mention is fast food it's all sit down restraunts of nice quality).  Went to a steak house one day and that was real easy of course.  Large salads were also easy to do just by skipping the croutons and bread.  I did include a few cheats like some good Colorado micro brews and a few glasses of wine, but hey, I was out and about and few cheats were well deserved at this point.

While I was in Colorado, I missed doing The Open 13.1 workout at my local box so I did it at Crossfit VIM in Lafayette, CO.  A great Box, lots of super nice people, and 13.1 is now my most memorable WOD ever!  It was awesome for a few reasons, one I was at a different box, next 135 was a new PR for snatch, and lastly because 135 was a new PR and so heavy it took a monumental amount of Beast Mode to just do 1 rep, and I managed to get in 8 reps at that weight!  The crazy part is the thinner air at 1 mile above sea level.  After each 135lb snatch, the whole room went dark and even sound faded out, it was a wild sensation, after a split second for my body to catch back up on oxygen I was fine and ready for the next rep!  I got to experience that euphoric state 8 times!  Super crazy, I definately felt super strong and made for a unique experience.  This week I was feeling back on my game and mentally back in it!

Paleo In a Box: Week 8 BP PR

This week I had an absolutely amazing PR, that I wasn't expecting at all!  I was at the doctor's office for my annual checkup and as is routine the nurse checks your weight, blood pressure, and ask's a few questions.  After she checked my blood pressures she was really impressed that it was so low!  She then tells me it was 100/60!  Even I was impressed with this number, normall my BP is always around the normal 120/80, maybe during the peak of racing season it will be as low as 117/78, but that's it, I've never had it as low as 100/60.  This is concrete evidence of how Paleo is affecting my health and overall wellness!

The more I thought about this, the more amazing I think this is, first of all I'm thinking why was better HEALTH not my goal instead of losing weight?  I suppose they are related, but really how much? it isn't like I was overweight to start with.  Next, I'm thinking my health is worth more than improved performance.  Certainly there is a relation between the two, but just because you are physically in good shape from exercise doesn't mean you won't get sick or any diseases.  It seems to happen fairly regularly that a great athlete dies from a heart attack or cancer... when it happens people just say, oh yeah he or she had bad genes, it was hereditary, and there was nothing they could do...   I would now argue against such a statement, perhaps a Paleo diet won't eliminate the risks of cancer or coronary disease, but after seeing the quick changes to my system in just two months, I guarantee paleo does drastically reduce the risks, even hereditary ones!

The annual doctor's visit included all usual bloodwork check and nearly every other biometric measurement was better or the same since the last time I was checked 6 months ago.  I'm going to publish that data in the final write-up for AMFAT Challenge Essay. 

PIB AMFAT Challenge: Week 7

So the indoor triathlon is over, and I'm sort of in a post event depressed mode.  Need to refocus on my next event, I have lots planned, I'm just feeling a bit out of sorts right now. 
The Crossfit Games Open starts next week, it's going to be really awesome, but hard to really think of it as a training goal.  It's one WOD per week for 5 weeks and I really can't treat it much different than just another workout.  So that's really not motivating me.  I need to be cycling, but the weather stinks and I've lost so much bodyfat it feels even colder out!  I need to review Rule #5, but I'm just not feeling that hardcore to do so.

One super cool thing happened this week though, and that is during swim practice we've started working on other swim strokes besides freestyle today we practiced BUTTERFLY!  Last year, I could not even make a reasonable attempt at this stroke as it takes a lot of energy and core power, just to do something that resembles the stroke.  Today, I swam a full 50m of something that looked and felt like the fly, it was like a mini-WOD in BEAST mode. I can only give Crossfit and PIB credit for having the energy, strength, and power to accomplish this! 
Definately a highlight for the week!

Paleo In A Box AMFAT Challenge: Week 6

Week 6 finished with a bang!  Saturday was the Indoor Triathlon I have been training overtime for. 
As I suspected the swim would be my weakest leg, normally this is not an issue, but for an indoor tri, this is a major leg of the race, the reason is the bike leg is done on indoor stationary bikes and it's all about spinning fast, nothing to do with strength or power, so basically all the top contenders are within seconds of each other... 
Here's how the race went,  out of the pool I was around 2 minutes behind the leader.  This was good as I had just swam my first official 500m in 9:46, a respectable swim for an intermediate like myself.  It's a PR in that I have timed myself in the past and last year I would have been around 12 minutes.  So good, but I was a long ways back.  The bike went like I expected, I turned a cadence of around 140 to 150 rpm, but probably only good enough to gain back 10 or 20 seconds on the leader at best, but I did gain a lot on everyone else and was the second one off the bike, therefore now in second place!  The run is done on an indoor track where 13 laps is one mile.  Lots of turning,  the run ended up being my strongest part of the tri, I ran the 5k in 20:39, which is a definate PR,  about every 10 laps I was gaining a lap on the leader, the race was super close and I was down to less than 1 lap, but I just ran out of time!  Came in second by about 20 seconds. 
Of course, I wanted to win, but I'll never complain when I performed at my best.  I definately did that, and shocked a lot of people too as I don't think anyone really took me serious about being a contender. 
As far as Paleo goes, not a whole lot to report this week. I was definately fueled and ready for this triathlon though, certainly have to give the PIB system credit for the proper nutrition!

6 minutes of your life you'll want back!

Here's a video blog a made talking about the PIB system and the progress I've made.  As a disclaimer, I'm not responsible for you wanting 6 minutes of your life back if you watch it all, I'm not that great in front of a camera.  This is my first Vlog I've ever done.